Simple advertising involves placing a notice describing an availability of goods or services. To be an effective advertisement, the notice should be placed where a party, interested in the goods or services, will give attention to the notice. The advertising industry actively competes, according to the nature of the notice, to optimize the placing of the notice and to optimize the attention that the notice will receive.
Until recently, the advertisement industry placed notices as billboards, signs, inclusion in newspapers, direct mailing, and using broadcast media. Today the Internet and other interactive electronic data-communications systems provide new ground for effective advertising.
In this respect, numerous developments in the advertising industry are noteworthy:                U.S. Pat. No. 5,774,170 System and method for delivering targeted advertisements to consumers;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,752,238 Consumer-driven electronic information pricing mechanism;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,740,549 Information and advertising distribution system and method;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,664,948 Delivery of data including preloaded advertising data;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,802,299: Interactive system for authoring hypertext document collections;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,761,683: Techniques for changing the behavior of a link in a hypertext; and        U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,210 Attention brokerage.        
These technologies (and the like) are being exploited by many types of “advertising distributors” such as:                Ad reach Networks (e.g. Doubleclick, 24/7 Media, Flycast);        Local Networks (e.g. digital cities);        Broadcast Networks (e.g. Pointcast, Marimba);        Content Networks, (e.g. CNET, Disney, AOL, etc.); and        Navigation Hubs (e.g. Yahoo, Excite, Netscape, etc.).        
What is nevertheless lacking in today's advertising industry is a mechanism which actively matches an individual potential customer with individual advertisements and then which expresses the rate structure for the individual advertisement as a function of a profile of the individual potential customer. Expressing the rate structure for the individual advertisement, as a function of a profile of the individual potential customer, is not a described nor a delivered product of any of the aforesaid service agencies.